Random musings on history, politics, and more

Are there any search words you can use on DeviantArt which return more than five results, and for which none of the results involve anthropomorphic animals? Not that I’ve found. I was searching for dingbats – printer’s devils – which you’d think would be safe, but, no… page after page of fanart for this oddly adorable thing, who is apparently named Dingbat. Sigh…

Might Better Off Ted be resurrected, after its untimely cancellation by ABC? Eh, probably not. Still, there is apparently always hope, since it seems the show has some influential fans.

Via the WikiLeak blog, a largely overlooked observation that Wikileaks’ fundraising efforts earlier this year apparently resulted in such a degree of credit-card fraud that it has essentially bankrupted TipIt, the micropayment service that once processed donations for them.

Of course, if Julian Assange believed in transparency or accountability, we might know whether any of the sixty-two thousand dollars processed by TipIt actually made it to “Wikileaks” (i.e. Assange), but, you know… that’s never going to happen.

On a related note, it’s now been a month and a half since Wikileaks “returned”, and they still haven’t leaked anything in that time period. In fact, they’ve “leaked” exactly one thing – the ridiculously edited Apache helicopter footage – since March.

Incidentally, Secrecy News has a very good article about Wikileaks which is, somewhat regrettably, being spammed with frothy comments from the rabid fanboys and digital anarchists, who by and large fail to see the analytic flaw in their “enemy of my enemy” reasoning. (i.e. “I hate the State, Wikileaks claims that the State hates Wikileaks, therefore I love Wikileaks.”) Ah, humans…